Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea

Jonathan responds to your texts and tweets, is joined in studio for all the latest science stories for Newsround and speaks to one of our two guests featured on the show. Listen and subscribe to Futureproof with Johnathan McCrea on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.
You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the Newstalk skill and asking: 'Alexa, play Newstalk'.

Jonathan responds to your texts and tweets, is joined in studio for all the latest science stories for Newsround and speaks to one of our two guests featured on the show. Listen and subscribe to Futureproof with Johnathan McCrea on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.
You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the Newstalk skill and asking: 'Alexa, play Newstalk'.

Jonathan responds to your texts and tweets, is joined in studio for all the latest science stories for Newsround and speaks to one of our two guests featured on the show. Listen and subscribe to Futureproof with Johnathan McCrea on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.
You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the Newstalk skill and asking: 'Alexa, play Newstalk'.

Do you remember Climate Change? Well, it hasn’t gone away you know. I know you're probably thinking we have enough problems to worry about at the moment but our next guest is proposing a solution. Seaweed! How is seaweed relevant? Tim Flannery is co-founder of the Australian Climate Council.

In the time between putting our head down to rest at night to when we wake up in the morning, how far do we travel in space without us knowing it? If the boiling point of water is 100°C, then how is it that the clothes we put out on the line dry at all? And, if I can see a flea, can a flea see a bacteria? There might be more profound questions to ask in the name of science, but the simplest questions can often uncover the most fascinating answers about the world around us. In this special...

What’s happening when you listen to this podcast? Jonathan has exhaled air and by moving parts of his mouth and throat, changed the sounds that the air makes as it exits his lungs and flows out into the atmosphere around him. Forgetting the microphone, the radio and whatever other middlemen that are involved in between for a moment, you are then receiving and interpreting this sound that he has made. How? James Hudspeth is a Biophysicist and Neuroscientist in The Laboratory of Sensory...

We’ve a very special episode coming up next week in which we’ll be answering your sometimes ingenious, more often than not bizarre, questions. We’ve had a huge response to this and the fact of the matter is that we just couldn’t fit all of the questions into next week’s show. One of the questions we couldn’t fit in was actually one of our favourites. There was just too much in it to only spend a few minutes at it so we’ve decided to do a full feature interview on it this week. And so...

Remember when you were in school and you learned that there were 9 planets in the solar system? Then there was all that unpleasantness with Pluto in 2006. Well good news! Thanks in part to our next guest you can essentially forget that that ever happened. Sort of... Mike Brown is Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology and one of the scientists at the forefront of the search for Planet 9.

Scientists say that it’s most likely that Covid-19 originated in Bats. If that is the case, you can add it to a list which features the likes of SARS in China 2003, Rabies in Peru in 2006 and Ebola in West Africa in 2013. So what is it about Bats that results in them transmitting so many deadly viruses to humans and what can we do about it? Dr. Daniel Streicker is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health & Comparative Medicine in the University of Glasgow, he...

We’re all probably loosely familiar with the idea that the dinosaurs were the victims of a mass extinction event You’re probably less familiar with the idea that that was the fifth of five such events over the course of the planet’s history Now that we ourselves are becoming a geological force, what can these past extinctions tell us about the future survival of life on this planet? Lauren Sallan is a Paleobiologist and Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at the...

About 550 million years ago natural selection gave us animals, 200 million years ago we had mammals and a mere 300,000 or so years ago you got us, homo sapiens. The evolutionary process is a slow one driven by very slight incremental alterations over unimaginably large swathes of time. Except perhaps when it comes to De Novo genes. So, what are De Novo genes and just how important are they? Aoife McLysaght - Professor in the School of Genetics and Microbiology in Trinity College Dublin and...

We think of the history of life on this planet as basically being, microbes, fish, dinosaurs and then us. But this does a huge disservice to the extraordinary diversity of life that has called the Earth home and indeed to the work of those who study it. So we’re going to take a bit of a guided tour through life, minus the dinosaurs because they always hog the limelight anyway. Lauren Sallan is a Paleobiologist and Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at the...

Whether you’re walking down the street, at the office or even going on your holidays modern life can be noisy, REALLY NOISY! It’s annoying. But might it a lot worse than just an irritation? Mathias Basner - Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine

At the moment it seems like almost the whole science community is focussed on Covid 19. And while it’s obvious to us all that this is an important endeavour, there are still other diseases out there that also require research. So, what is it like to plough a lonely furrow and commit to researching one of the more obscure diseases that afflicts human beings? Dr Joanne Masterson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at NUI Maynooth and Member of the Kathleen Lonsdale Institute...

Around this time last year we talked about the detrimental effects of noise in our lives with Mathias Basner. But if noise can have physiological effects that go way beyond our auditory system what can silence do? Real silence. Steve Orfield is President of Orfield Laboratories where the quietest place on Earth can be found

AI can do so many things better than we can. When it comes to calculating something or sifting through lots of data at breakneck speeds there is just no competition between us and the robots. And yet they are pretty useless at so many of the simple things we take for granted that even a toddler could do. But perhaps that’s because we haven’t taken the time to teach them like we do our infants? Mark Lee is Emeritus Professor of Intelligent Systems in the Department of Computer Science at...

Emotions are tricky things to get a handle on and much of our greatest literature, music and film is devoted to trying to understand human feelings. So can science succeed were many of our great artists and philosophers have failed? Lauren Riters is Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Wisconsin

Did you know that 90% of statistics are fraudulent? No? Well that's good because that’s not true. As Benjamin Disraeli famously said “"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Except that he didn’t actually. That’s not true either. What we're getting at is in this world of fake news, just what can we trust and how do we navigate through the sheer volume of numbers we read day in day out? Paul Goodwin is Emeritus Professor at the University of Bath and Author of...

Unless you’re Donald Trump, you’ve probably noticed that we haven’t been taking the greatest care of our planet over the last few centuries. And our search for life elsewhere has shown us that we’re not exactly blessed with an abundance of similar worlds in our immediate neighbourhood. So what if things got so bad that we had to move beyond our solar system? How feasible is an interstellar mission and what considerations would we have to take on board to ensure the viability of a second...

Of the five traditionally accepted senses smell is definitely the overlooked underappreciated hipsters choice. I mean who would pick their sense of smell to keep over any of the other four? Yet it can be so evocative and so surprising in it’s impact on us. If you’ve ever had a smell bring you back to a specific time or feeling you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. So how does smell work exactly? Luca Turin is a Biophysicist, Group Leader in Quantum Neurobiology at the Fleming Institute...

Here on Futureproof, we have been longstanding supporters of 'FameLab' - the world's leading science communication competition that spans over 30 countries - putting scientists on stage to talk about a particular idea or area of study. With just their wits and a couple of props, the top newest voices in science, technology, engineering and maths from across Ireland will give 3 minute talks on always fascinating, sometimes bizarre science concepts - the final of which will be taking place...

A few weeks back we chatted to Chris Wanjek about human spacefaring and he briefly talked about hollowing out an asteroid to use as an interstellar spacecraft. This got us thinking about the idea of interstellar travel so we decided to find ourselves a scientist who was working on that precise thing. Our regular listeners will probably be unsurprised to hear that there is not just one scientist engaged in this research but numerous organisations Andreas Hein is the Executive Director of one...

Every day Youtube sees around 500 new ASMR videos uploaded and the top five ASMR channels have nearly two billion views So just what is ASMR? Dr. Giulia Poerio is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Exeter and one of the co-authors on a paper examining the physiological effects of ASMR